I’ll Trade You an Evolutionary Theory for Your Creationism

Mixed emotions over PZ Myers’ condescending response to a 12-year-old child‘s email supporting creationism[1], reminded of a very interesting conversation I had with my father at a dinner this holiday season. Lemons and lemonade, people.

During our conversational meanderings, we touched on the debate between creationism[2] and evolution. We did not directly discuss the political/social issues surrounding the teaching of evolution in schools[3].  Rather, we discussed the difficulty of convincing individuals that evolution is right and creationism is wrong. Continue reading “I’ll Trade You an Evolutionary Theory for Your Creationism”

What do Diamonds and Stamps have in common?

They are both “forever”.

The US Postal Service (USPS) announced that, starting in 2011, all new first-class stamps will be FOREVER stamps. I’ve been arguing for this long before the first FOREVER stamp, probably since about 2001, when I saw the use of such stamps in the UK firsthand. Usually, I claim that no one ever listens to me[1]. Not today. Continue reading “What do Diamonds and Stamps have in common?”

Scientific Method in Decline?

Jonah Leher in The New Yorker about the slipperiness of the scientific method:

“The Truth Wears Off: Is There Something Wrong With The Scientific Method?”

The test of replicability, as it’s known, is the foundation of modern research. Replicability is how the community enforces itself. It’s a safeguard for the creep of subjectivity. Most of the time, scientists know what results they want, and that can influence the results they get. The premise of replicability is that the scientific community can correct for these flaws.

But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology.

The piece, dressed up in a bit of mysticism, is essentially a description of some well known (but too rarely acknowledged) biases in science: Unconscious selection of favorable data; the tendency to publish only positive results, and the effects of randomness. Continue reading “Scientific Method in Decline?”

Sci-fi’s clumsy, mawkish Golden Age

Author Jonathan Lethem has an apt description of science fiction in the 40’s and 50’s (PDF):

At the time [Philip Dick] entered the field, science fiction was preoccupied with genuine scientific developments, space exploration boosterism, and a super- rational cognition. Where everyone else was writing about extrapolation and thinking hard about real possibilities, Dick was attuned to the unconscious, the irrational, the paranoiac, the impulsive. His stories had a wildly hallucinatory nature that he treated as if it were rational.

Now, the stories of the other science fiction writers were not as rational as they claim. They were quite in the grip of a fabulating imagination or wish fulfillment. They were writing fairy tales more than they acknowledge. But Dick engaged in the most direct and distinctive way with the undertow of terror and the irrational in contemporary technological society. That’s why science fiction was important to begin with, because it addressed the fact that we were living in a technocratic age when traditional arts, literary and otherwise, didn’t have much to say on this and didn’t find a lot of vocabulary for acknowledging the increasing rate of change and what it did to the experience of ordinary life. Science fiction in its clumsy, mawkish, embarrassing way was taking the bull by the horns.

This is along the lines of what I was getting at in my post on John Wyndham.
Continue reading “Sci-fi’s clumsy, mawkish Golden Age”

Krugman on the Santa Fe Institute

He captures my feelings nicely (except for that bit about being excited 20 years ago – 10 in my case):

Oh, and about Roger Doyne Farmer (sorry, Roger!) and Santa Fe and complexity and all that: I was one of the people who got all excited about the possibility of getting somewhere with very detailed agent-based models — but that was 20 years ago. And after all this time, it’s all still manifestos and promises of great things one of these days.